ScienceLogic Launches App Store To Share Customized Monitoring Apps

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ScienceLogic announced a new App Store today that enables customers and third parties to create and share customized apps for the ScienceLogic platform.

ScienceLogic is a cloud service that lets IT pros monitor every aspect of their IT infrastructure whether it’s in the cloud or on premises, getting right down to the data center infrastructure management layer if needed.

ScienceLogic CEO, Dave Link says that they deliberately developed a platform with the idea of being able to plug in any device or service and configure it to meet the needs of an individual customer. This approach has worked well up until now by providing a way to accommodate whatever type of equipment or service the customer uses.

But Link says the company also recognized early on that they couldn’t possibly include every monitoring scenario out of the box. With today’s announcement, they are giving customers and interested third parties, the ability to build PowerApps — individual apps with a particular type of functionality such as data collection, alarming or reporting — and they are classifying these PowerApps into PowerPacks consisting of a group of related apps.

As Link explained, two companies could be using the same technologies in very different ways and have widely different monitoring requirements. For instance, two companies using the same tool for manufacturing and healthcare might have very different needs and this new development environment provides a way to accommodate those different requirements.

In fact, customer Hughes Satellite has been creating customized packs for some time. He says because they manufacture their own equipment, they built their own packs that are very specific to their technologies.

ScienceLogic has created a development environment to give developers a way to plug into the platform and access all of the services built into the platform such as analytics, reporting, notifications and so forth without having to reinvent the wheel. What’s more, they have designed the apps in such a way that users can share them if they wish, lock them down and charge for them, or even set it up so that users get some functionality for free, but need a key to unlock the full functionality.

Link says the store will open with 1500-1800 packages for products with such disparate use cases as an IBM mainframe, a DEC Alpha, Unix and Solaris and New Relic. The idea is to provide as much flexibility as they can as a company and let customers produce some of the more unusual use cases they haven’t considered or are too specialized for a broader audience.

He said people could use this service in any number of ways, but he hopes to build a community of developers who share information, and at least in some cases share apps and packages for specific use case scenarios. In other cases, he said larger customers will build their own packages tuned to their requirements and some third parties like system integrators will charge for their unique expertise.

Link said they won’t be letting customers fly without a net though. There will be documentation, videos and classes to help acclimate people to the platform and give them sample code and a starting point for their projects. They will also provide consulting services for those that need it.

He said while it’s easier to create apps with these tools, how long it takes for any individual project would depend on the complexity of the APIs you were trying to link to.

Link wouldn’t give a specific number in terms of how he would define success for the new app store, but he would like to see more packages and see new customers who are attracted to this idea of being able to customize the platform.

“I’ve always believed in open architecture,” Link says .”You can’t predict what’s going to be meaningful for different companies.” He adds that by providing an open architecture, it provides a way to build apps quickly that are important to them.